The explosion of radicalism and emergence of make-believe kingdoms must be seen as the superficial eruption of the simmering magma of social order and public morals.
By
YUDI LATIF
·5 minutes read
The explosion of radicalism and emergence of make-believe kingdoms must be seen as the superficial eruption of the simmering magma of social order and public morals. The history of the archipelago shows that, whenever the center of power as the center of exemplary behavior fails to provide social and moral order, chaos reigns as people in the periphery long for a “ratu adil” (just leader).
For example, after the forced cultivation system led to widespread suffering, while resistance in the wars of Java and Sumatra was quelled and local aristocracies were forced to kowtow to colonial power, the people suffered without any hope for help or exemplary leadership. In this era of sorrow and despair, elegiac poems emerged from various parts of the archipelago. In Hikayat Abdullah (The Tale of Abdullah), Abdullah bin Abdul Kadir Munshi (1843) lamented, “The old order has been destroyed, a new world emerges, and everything around us changes.” Meanwhile, ahead of his death in 1873, the Surakarta Palace’s celebrated poem R. Ng. Ranggawarsita wrote Serat Kalatidha (Poem for the Age of Doubts). The poem’s first verse goes, “The state’s shimmer fades away in the ruins of teachings of wisdom and the absence of role models. The intellectuals are carried away by the currents of the age of doubts. Everything darkens. The world is drowned in sorrow.”
It is from these ruins of destroyed social order that we have been witnessing the emergence of splinter and “millenniarism” groups since the late 19th century. Examples include the farmers’ rebellion in Banten (1888), the Saminism movement in Blora (1890) and the birth of proto-nationalist organizations in the early 20th century.
The question is: Why has the Reform Era brought about a crisis of social and moral order? Mainly, this is because the liberties celebrated in the Reform Era’s order are limited to natural liberty, instead of being actualized into civil liberty. In the views of Jean-Jacques Rosseau, natural liberty highly depends on the power of each individual to chase their own wants; the strong prevails and the weak loses. On the other hand, in civil liberty, these individual wants and powers are curbed by the general will and the common good.
Despite the democratic practice of direct elections, elected administrations do not automatically work in the interest of upholding the people’s sovereignty. Theoretically, every citizen has the right to elect and be elected. However, the fact is that people’s choice can be manipulated at various levels; and with elections being so costly, not everyone can run for office.
Democracy tends to neglect civil virtues and the general will and be mired in chaotic governance, corruption scandals and weak legal authority as a result of money’s widespread penetration in power.
In a capital-intensive and manipulative democracy, a surplus of liberty does not necessary bring about a more just and civilized order of life. Democracy tends to neglect civil virtues and the general will and be mired in chaotic governance, corruption scandals and weak legal authority as a result of money’s widespread penetration in power.
Without “civil liberty”, it has been proven that “natural liberty” cannot defeat tyranny (the centralizing of despotic power). In a healthy democracy, power relations must be reciprocal and mutually influential. In the view of Michel Foucault, “power” is necessary to maintain the life of the people, to the extent that the power relations amount to “strategic games between independent parties”. A power relation becomes destructive when the relation pattern becomes dominative; when the subordinate parties only have a narrow space to maneuver due to their highly limited options of action.
In a reciprocal power relation, sources of power may include cultural capital (knowledge, symbolic power), political capital (parties, social network) and financial capital. These three types of capital have their own influence within the power relation as the prerequisites of justice in the allocation of strategic resources in a society.
Costly democracy has fundamentally altered these power relations. The oligarchies of rulers-capital owners have not only monopolized economic sectors but also taken control of cultural power through mass media and symbolic powers in public spaces.
Moreover, the flow of money into politics has polluted public life. All values are converted into amounts of money. Political relations are replaced with relations of consumerism. Politics is commercialized and privatized. Through consumerization, brand recognition and image-building have replaced quality and identity. Through privatization, capital has invaded our democracy by placing I above us, which has provoked a widespread rejection of all things civic and public.
Democracy, which has always existed to control personal interests by prioritizing common interests, is now subjected to particular powers. A crisis of democracy, according to Robert Reich, emerges when “our wishes as investors and consumers can win as our collective values as citizens no longer have an effective medium to express themselves.”
This disconnect between public aspirations and policies is the main trigger of the waves of radicalism and the attraction of “romanticism” (hallucination) of glory as a self-defense mechanism in the struggle for self-expression. To escape from this violent and chaotic social-moral order, a self-correction in our democracy is necessary. Natural liberties must be transformed into civil liberties by upholding civic virtues based on Pancasila and a general will in realizing a nation’s life that is independent, united, sovereign, just and prosperous.